In August 2007, Jessica Blank, a New York Theatre Workshop resident artist in residence at Dartmouth College working on Liberty City, was talking with NYTW artistic director James C. Nicola about the paucity of theatre featuring the stories of ordinary middle-eastern citizens affected by recent conflicts and wars. Fast-forward 25 months, and Blank and her co-author husband, Erik Jensen, are putting the finishing touches on Aftermath, a documentary-style theatre piece based on their interviews with displaced Iraqi refugees.

A period of 25 months from inception to production seems like lightning speed in terms of the theatrical world, where scripts can languish in development hell for years. “The show is timely, and needed to happen quickly,” Nicola said in an interview earlier this summer regarding the relatively brief, but intense creative process for Aftermath.

Thanks to support from The Ford Foundation, Blank and Jensen traveled to Jordan in June 2008 where CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Civilians in Conflict) put them in touch with potential interview subjects and provided translators to facilitate conversation. For two weeks, the authors conducted three or four interviews a day with refugees from every walk of life.

“We were prepared for hostility, or at least caution as Americans. We expected blame to be assigned to us,” explains Blank. “We were surprised at the range of attitudes toward us, and the incredible sense of welcome... People opened up their homes to us, and insisted that we share their last box of cookies.” She says that people in Iraq get, on a visceral level, the policies of government and the people of that country, and was “amazed that interview subjects never extended that to apply to American people, or to specifically to us.

”Following the interview process, Blank and Jensen selected 15 conversations to be translated and transcribed verbatim, taking care that the subjects’ nuance be preserved. After a series of workshops, they further distilled the conversations until the play centered around nine refugees (including two couples), and one translator figure – the only composite character in the play; all refugees’ dialogue is comprised solely of the interview subjects’ own words (though character names have been changed to prevent the citizens’ being seen as collaborating with outsiders).

“No one had been fans of Saddam,” says Blank, to which Jensen adds “Most of the people hated him.” Blankexpounds that “There was a lot of hope among the population in Iraq. After a few weeks (of the arrival of American forces on March 20, 2003), they were convinced that things would be better… They now refer to Saddam’s regime as ‘the good old days.’”

Blank compares the process of writing a conventional play to “painting on a blank canvas, while documentary plays are more like carving and whittling down a block of marble.” Jensen adds that though there are a lot of documentary films, television program, and books out there about Iraq, “with theatre, you actually encounter a living person, and the screen dissolves.” 

“Except for language,” he continues, “all people have the same wants and needs. Most Americans may not understand praying five times a day, but everyone knows what it’s like to want to go home, or to lose a loved one. When boundaries dissolve, that’s when change happens.”

Top: Fajer Al-Kaisi, Demosthenes Chrysan. Above: The cast of AFTERMATH: Maha Chehlaoui, Daoud Heidami, Amir Arison, Leila Buck, Demosthenes Chrysan, Laith Nakli, Fajer Al-Kaisi, Rasha Zamamiri, Omar Koury. Photos by Joan Marcus.